RADIO · SKY · RIGHT NOW
Radio under the aurora
The aurora is a permanent ring of light around each pole, and it’s hanging over a real town somewhere right now — a place with a radio station on the air beneath it. This reads the live NOAA space-weather forecast and shows you which listening towns have the northern (or southern) lights overhead this minute, so you can tune in and hear the place while the sky is alight. And when a thunderstorm is rolling over one of the world’s radio cities, that’s here too — the dramatic sky above a place, in its own voice. It’s the same planet the listening globe spins, pointed now at wherever the sky is putting on a show.
Aurora overhead right now
NOAA OVATIONReading the live aurora forecast…
Under a storm cell
OPEN-METEOReading the weather over the world’s radio cities…
How this works
The aurora forecast is the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center’s OVATION model — a free, worldwide 30-minute forecast of visible-aurora probability, refreshed every few minutes. We read the probability directly over each of 15 curated aurora broadcast towns— the high-latitude places, north and south, that sit under the oval and carry a genuinely local station — and rank them by how likely the lights are overhead right now. The number you see is the model’s own probability, shown as-is: aurora is fickle, so we never dress a quiet night up as a good one. The storm list is Open-Meteo current weather over the world’s radio cities — a city appears only when a real thunderstorm is overhead this minute. Tap TUNE INon either and the town’s top-voted station plays straight from the broadcaster’s own servers, its real local clock ticking beside it.